Towards better cooperative learning in urban planning education

ABSTRACT

Urban planning is a practical multifarious discipline and thus teamwork competence is important for urban planners. Cooperative learning is a possible method of obtaining this competence in the education process. Our aim is to investigate the cooperative learning method on the Urban Planning undergraduate course at the Faculty of Environmental Sciences, Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague. Our paper focuses on the influence of student-directed assessment on free-riding problem, and students´ dealing with teachers´ dissensus. We present student perspectives based on a questionnaire and face-to-face interviews with all students in the final year of the course. The results are discussed considering cultural differences based on aspects of power distance and uncertainty avoidance. Our main findings support the importance of a student-driven approach in collaborative learning as prevention against the free-riding problem, and multiple teacher lessons as prevention against the conformist approach, and to promote critical thinking.

KEYWORDS:

• Cooperative learning
• urban planning
• power distance
• Czech Republic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Local plan is a planning documentation according to §43 of Building Act 183/2006 valid for the whole town area, defining the basic concept of town development.

2. Master plan, according to §30 of Building Act 183/2006, proposes, checks, and evaluates possible solutions of specific problems. The area of the master plan is not defined by the Act. However, usually, it is a part of the town which must be designed in greater detail than in the local plan.

3. Regulatory plan, according to §61 of Building Act 183/2006, defines the principle requirements for parcels in a defined area.

4. To be more specified, we use score for “organizational PD” of GLOBE in this study for its relevancy to pedagogy of dissensus problem. The score for PD is 3.74 of 7, the score for UA is 3.53 of 7.